The whole point of having laws against defamation, whether libel (written defamation) or slander (spoken defamation), is to hold people to higher epistemic standards when they communicate very negative things about people or organizations—especially negative things that would stick in the readers/listeners minds in ways that would be very hard for subsequent corrections or clarifications to counter-act.
Without making any comment about the accuracy or inaccuracy of this post, I would just point out that nobody in EA should be shocked that an organization (e.g. Nonlinear) that is being libeled (in its view) would threaten a libel suit to deter the false accusations (as they see them), to nudge the author(e.g. Ben Pace) towards making sure that their negative claims are factually correct and contextually fair.
That is the whole point and function of defamation law: to promote especially high standards of research, accuracy, and care when making severe negative comments. This helps promote better epistemics, when reputations are on the line. If we never use defamation law for its intended purpose, we’re being very naive about the profound costs of libel and slander to those who might be falsely accused.
EA Forum is a very active public forum, where accusations can have very high stakes for those who have devoted their lives to EA. We should not expect that EA Forum should be completely insulated from defamation law, or that posts here should be immune to libel suits. Again, the whole point of libel suits is to encourage very high epistemic standards when people are making career-ruining and organization-ruining claims.
Whatever its legitimate uses, defamation law is also an extremely useful cudgel that bad actors can, and very frequently do, use to protect their reputations from true accusations. The cost in money, time and risk of going through a defamation trial is such that threats of such can very easily intimidate would-be truth-tellers into silence, especially when the people making the threat have a history of retaliation. Making such threats even when the case for defamation seems highly dubious (as here), should shift us toward believing that we are in the defamation-as-unscrupulous-cudgel world, and update our beliefs about Nonlinear accordingly.
Whether or not we should be shocked epistemically that Nonlinear made such threats here, I claim that we should both condemn and punish them for doing so (within the extent of the law), and create a norm that you don’t do that here. I claim this even if Nonlinear’s upcoming rebuttal proves to be very convincing.
I don’t want a community where we need extremely high burdens of proof to publish true bad things about people. That’s bad for everyone (except the offenders), but especially for the vulnerable people who fall prey to the people doing the bad things because they happen not to have access to the relevant rumor mill. It’s also toxic to our overall epistemics as a community, as it predictably and dramatically skews the available evidence we have to form opinions about people.
In the broader uncooperative world, you don’t generally give organizations you’re criticizing the opportunity to review a draft and prepare a response. When organizations granted this opportunity respond by threatening to sue, especially if they wouldn’t actually sue but just would prefer it not be published, that pushes authors away from offering the courtesy.
People are so irrationally intimidated by lawyers that some legal firms make all their money by sending out thousands of scary form letters demanding payment for bullshit transgressions. My company was threatened with thousands of frivolous lawsuits but only actually sued once.
I agree there are some circumstances under which libel suits are justified, but the net-effect on the availability of libel suits strikes me as extremely negative for communities like ours, and I think it’s very reasonable to have very strong norms against threatening or going through with these kinds of suits. Just because an option is legally available, doesn’t mean that a community has to be fine with that option being pursued.
That is the whole point and function of defamation law: to promote especially high standards of research, accuracy, and care when making severe negative comments. This helps promote better epistemics, when reputations are on the line.
This, in-particular, strikes me as completely unsupported. The law does not strike me as particularly well-calibrated about what promotes good communal epistemics, and I do not see how preventing negative evidence from being spread, which is usually the most undersupplied type of evidence already, helps “promote better epistemics”. Naively the prior should be that when you suppress information, you worsen the accuracy of people’s models of the world.
As a concrete illustration of this, libel law in the U.S. and the U.K. function very differently. It seems to me that the U.S. law has a much better effects on public discourse, by being substantially harder actually make happen. It is also very hard to sue someone in a foreign court for libel (i.e. a US citizen suing a german citizen is very hard).
This means we can’t have a norm that generically permits libel suits, since U.K. libel suits follow a very different standard than U.S. ones, and we have to decide for ourselves where our standards for information control like this is.
IMO, both U.S. and UK libel suits should both be very strongly discouraged, since I know of dozens of cases where organizations and individuals have successfully used them to prevent highly important information from being propagated, and I think approximately no case where they did something good (instead organizations that frequently have to deal with libel suits mostly just leverage loopholes in libel law that give them approximate immunity, even when making very strong and false accusations, usually with the clarity of the arguments and the transparency of the evidence taking a large hit).
Without making any comment about the accuracy or inaccuracy of this post, I would just point out that nobody in EA should be shocked that an organization (e.g. Nonlinear) that is being libeled (in its view) would threaten a libel suit to deter the false accusations (as they see them), to nudge the author(e.g. Ben Pace) towards making sure that their negative claims are factually correct and contextually fair.
[...] To support a claim for defamation, in most states a private figure need only show negligence by the publisher, a much lower standard than “actual malice.”
[...] A plaintiff can establish negligence on the part of the defendant by showing that the defendant did not act with a reasonable level of care in publishing the statement at issue. This basically turns on whether the defendant did everything reasonably necessary to determine whether the statement was true, including the steps the defendant took in researching, editing, and fact checking his work. Some factors that the court might consider include:
the amount of research undertaken prior to publication;
the trustworthiness of sources;
attempts to verify questionable statements or solicit opposing views; and
whether the defendant followed other good journalistic practices.
Ben says he spent “100-200 hours” researching this post, which is way beyond the level of thoroughness we should require for criticizing an organization on LessWrong or the EA Forum. I think it’s pretty clear that the post reflects this work: whether or not the post is wrong (e.g., maybe Ben was tricked by Alice and Chloe), it’s obvious that Ben did a supererogatory amount of fact-checking, investigating, and collecting takes from multiple parties.
I think there should be a strong norm against threatening people with libel merely for saying a falsehood; the standard should at minimum be that you have good reason to think the person is deliberately lying or indulging in tabloid-newspaper levels of bullshit.
I think the standard should be way higher than that, given the chilling effect of litigiousness; but in this case I think it’s sufficient to say that Ben clearly isn’t lying or flippantly disregarding the truth (whether or not he got some of the facts wrong), so threatening him with a lawsuit is clearly inappropriate. The standard for libel lawsuits needs to be way higher than “I factually disagree with something you said (that makes me look bad)”.
It is indeed high stakes! But in my opinion they have opted in to this sort of accusation being openly stated. Many hundreds or even thousands of people have given their lives and efforts to causes and projects led by high-status people in EA, often on the grounds that it is “high trust” and the people are well-intentioned. Once you are taking those resources — for instance having a woman you talked to once at an EAG come and fly out and live with you and work for you while nomadically traveling and paying her next to nothing, or do the same via a short hiring process — then as soon as someone else in that group sees credible evidence that “Wait, these people look to me like they have taken advantage of this resource and really hurt some people and intimidated them into covering it up”, then it behooves them to say so loud and clear!
Perhaps you do not believe this is true of EA circles, and as an older person in these circles that generally correlates (quite wisely) with being on the more hesitant side of giving your full life to whatever a person currently in EA leadership randomly thinks you should do. Nonetheless I think two younger people here have been eaten up and chewed out and I think it’ll happen again, because of people resting on this inaccurately high level of trust. So I’ll say it as loud as you like :)
To some extent, I agree with this, but I also think it overlooks an important component of how defamation law is used in practice — which is not to hold people to high epistemic norms but instead to scare them out of harming your reputation regardless of the truth. This is something folks who work on corporate campaigns for farmed animal welfare run into all the time. And, because our legal system is imperfect, it often works. Brian Martin has a good write-up on the flaws in our legal system that contribute to this:
Cost: If you are sued for defamation, you could end up paying tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees, even if you win. If you lose, you could face a massive pay-out on top of the fees.
The large costs, due especially to the cost of legal advice, mean that most people never sue for defamation. If you don’t have much money, you don’t have much chance against a rich opponent, whether you are suing them or they are suing you. Cases can go on for years. Judgements can be appealed. The costs become enormous. Only those with deep pockets can pursue such cases to the end.
The result is that defamation law is often used by the rich and powerful to deter criticisms. It is seldom helpful to ordinary people whose reputations are attacked unfairly.
Unpredictability:People say and write defamatory things all the time, but only a very few are threatened with defamation. Sometimes gross libels pass unchallenged while comparatively innocuous comments lead to major court actions. This unpredictability has a chilling effect on free speech. Writers, worried about defamation, cut out anything that might offend. Publishers, knowing how much it can cost to lose a case, have lawyers go through articles to cut out anything that might lead to a legal action. The result is a tremendous inhibition of free speech.
Complexity: Defamation law is so complex that most writers and publishers prefer to be safe than sorry, and do not publish things that are quite safe because they’re not sure. Judges and lawyers have excessive power because outsiders cannot understand how the law will be applied. Those who might desire to defend against a defamation suit without a lawyer are deterred by the complexities.
Slowness: Sometimes defamation cases are launched months after the statement in question. Cases often take years to resolve. This causes anxiety, especially for those sued, and deters free speech in the meantime. As the old saying goes, “Justice delayed is justice denied.”
I’m not saying this is what’s happening here — I have no idea about the details of any of these allegations. But what if someone did have additional private information about Nonlinear or the folks involved? Unless they are rich or have a sophisticated understanding of the law, the scary lawyer talk from Nonlinear here might deter them from talking about it at all, and I think that’s a really bad epistemic norm. This isn’t to say “the EA Forum should be completely insulated from defamation law” or anything, but in a high-trust community where people will respond to alternatives like publicly sharing counterevidence, threatening lawsuits seems like it might hinder, rather than help, epistemics.
I want to point out that the existence of a libel law that is expensive to engage with, does practically nothing against the posting of anonymized callout posts. You can’t sue someone you can’t identify.
Love it or hate it: the more harshly libel law is enforced, the more I expect similar things to be handled through fully-anonymous or low-transparency channels, instead of high-transparency ones. And in aggregate, I expect an environment high on libel suits, to disincentivize transparent behavior or highly specific allegations (which risks de-anonymization) on the part of accusers, more strongly than it incentivizes epistemic carefulness.
This is one reason to be against encouraging highly litigious attitudes, that I haven’t yet seen mentioned, so I thought I’d briefly put it out there.
I am not a lawyer but have read about defamation law and asked lawyers questions about it. I don’t believe your description of defamation law is as clear cut as you’re making it out to be.
The standard for fault in defamation cases involving private figures is that the defamer had to be “negligent.” That is, they have to have failed to do something they were required to do. Negligence is a vague standard, and it is up to the jury to decide what that means. Framing the point of defamation law as “encourage very high epistemic standards” is just too strong a statement. A jury could interpret it that way, but a jury could interpret it as a much much lower standard.
Furthermore, in my view, basic elements of this post make it a weak case, regardless of whether the claims within it are true of false. Ben is not stating these claims as undisputed, unqualified facts. He is reporting information others have shared with him. It’s only straightforward defamation if he is just making up what people said to him. It’d be more in the defamation camp if Ben himself was saying “Nonlinear mistreated me.”
It seems absolutely inappropriate to me for Nonlinear to threaten to sue in this case. This is a tactic abusers use, and high-integrity people pursue it in much narrower cases.
No, a kneejerk threat of libel still seems to me really bad, whether it’s legally permissable or not. Seems far worse epistemic damage than the thing it seeks to mitigate.
If people do this regularly I’d give to a legal defense fund for people to be able to post criticisms of org founders without fear.
If we aren’t able to criticise non-profits without fear of libel then how exactly are we supposed to hold each other to account.
This seems particularly clear in the case of non-anonymous posts like Ben’s. Ben posted a thing that risks damaging Nonlinear’s reputation. In the process, he’s put his own reputation at risk: Nonlinear can publicly respond with information that shows Ben was wrong (and perhaps negligent, unfair, etc.), causing us to put a lot less stock in Ben’s word next time around.
Alice and Chloe are anonymous, but by having a named individual vouch for them to some degree, we create a situation where ordinary reputational costs can do a good job of incentivizing honesty on everyone’s part.
A brief note on defamation law:
The whole point of having laws against defamation, whether libel (written defamation) or slander (spoken defamation), is to hold people to higher epistemic standards when they communicate very negative things about people or organizations—especially negative things that would stick in the readers/listeners minds in ways that would be very hard for subsequent corrections or clarifications to counter-act.
Without making any comment about the accuracy or inaccuracy of this post, I would just point out that nobody in EA should be shocked that an organization (e.g. Nonlinear) that is being libeled (in its view) would threaten a libel suit to deter the false accusations (as they see them), to nudge the author(e.g. Ben Pace) towards making sure that their negative claims are factually correct and contextually fair.
That is the whole point and function of defamation law: to promote especially high standards of research, accuracy, and care when making severe negative comments. This helps promote better epistemics, when reputations are on the line. If we never use defamation law for its intended purpose, we’re being very naive about the profound costs of libel and slander to those who might be falsely accused.
EA Forum is a very active public forum, where accusations can have very high stakes for those who have devoted their lives to EA. We should not expect that EA Forum should be completely insulated from defamation law, or that posts here should be immune to libel suits. Again, the whole point of libel suits is to encourage very high epistemic standards when people are making career-ruining and organization-ruining claims.
Whatever its legitimate uses, defamation law is also an extremely useful cudgel that bad actors can, and very frequently do, use to protect their reputations from true accusations. The cost in money, time and risk of going through a defamation trial is such that threats of such can very easily intimidate would-be truth-tellers into silence, especially when the people making the threat have a history of retaliation. Making such threats even when the case for defamation seems highly dubious (as here), should shift us toward believing that we are in the defamation-as-unscrupulous-cudgel world, and update our beliefs about Nonlinear accordingly.
Whether or not we should be shocked epistemically that Nonlinear made such threats here, I claim that we should both condemn and punish them for doing so (within the extent of the law), and create a norm that you don’t do that here. I claim this even if Nonlinear’s upcoming rebuttal proves to be very convincing.
I don’t want a community where we need extremely high burdens of proof to publish true bad things about people. That’s bad for everyone (except the offenders), but especially for the vulnerable people who fall prey to the people doing the bad things because they happen not to have access to the relevant rumor mill. It’s also toxic to our overall epistemics as a community, as it predictably and dramatically skews the available evidence we have to form opinions about people.
Agreed on all counts.
In the broader uncooperative world, you don’t generally give organizations you’re criticizing the opportunity to review a draft and prepare a response. When organizations granted this opportunity respond by threatening to sue, especially if they wouldn’t actually sue but just would prefer it not be published, that pushes authors away from offering the courtesy.
I’ll quote Emerson Spartz on this one:
I agree there are some circumstances under which libel suits are justified, but the net-effect on the availability of libel suits strikes me as extremely negative for communities like ours, and I think it’s very reasonable to have very strong norms against threatening or going through with these kinds of suits. Just because an option is legally available, doesn’t mean that a community has to be fine with that option being pursued.
This, in-particular, strikes me as completely unsupported. The law does not strike me as particularly well-calibrated about what promotes good communal epistemics, and I do not see how preventing negative evidence from being spread, which is usually the most undersupplied type of evidence already, helps “promote better epistemics”. Naively the prior should be that when you suppress information, you worsen the accuracy of people’s models of the world.
As a concrete illustration of this, libel law in the U.S. and the U.K. function very differently. It seems to me that the U.S. law has a much better effects on public discourse, by being substantially harder actually make happen. It is also very hard to sue someone in a foreign court for libel (i.e. a US citizen suing a german citizen is very hard).
This means we can’t have a norm that generically permits libel suits, since U.K. libel suits follow a very different standard than U.S. ones, and we have to decide for ourselves where our standards for information control like this is.
IMO, both U.S. and UK libel suits should both be very strongly discouraged, since I know of dozens of cases where organizations and individuals have successfully used them to prevent highly important information from being propagated, and I think approximately no case where they did something good (instead organizations that frequently have to deal with libel suits mostly just leverage loopholes in libel law that give them approximate immunity, even when making very strong and false accusations, usually with the clarity of the arguments and the transparency of the evidence taking a large hit).
Naive idea (not trying to resolve anything that already happened) :
Have people declare publicly if they want, for themselves, a norm where you don’t say bad things about them and they don’t say bad things about you.
If they say yes then you could take it into account with how you filter evidence about them.
Per https://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/proving-fault-actual-malice-and-negligence (h/t kave):
Ben says he spent “100-200 hours” researching this post, which is way beyond the level of thoroughness we should require for criticizing an organization on LessWrong or the EA Forum. I think it’s pretty clear that the post reflects this work: whether or not the post is wrong (e.g., maybe Ben was tricked by Alice and Chloe), it’s obvious that Ben did a supererogatory amount of fact-checking, investigating, and collecting takes from multiple parties.
I think there should be a strong norm against threatening people with libel merely for saying a falsehood; the standard should at minimum be that you have good reason to think the person is deliberately lying or indulging in tabloid-newspaper levels of bullshit.
I think the standard should be way higher than that, given the chilling effect of litigiousness; but in this case I think it’s sufficient to say that Ben clearly isn’t lying or flippantly disregarding the truth (whether or not he got some of the facts wrong), so threatening him with a lawsuit is clearly inappropriate. The standard for libel lawsuits needs to be way higher than “I factually disagree with something you said (that makes me look bad)”.
It is indeed high stakes! But in my opinion they have opted in to this sort of accusation being openly stated. Many hundreds or even thousands of people have given their lives and efforts to causes and projects led by high-status people in EA, often on the grounds that it is “high trust” and the people are well-intentioned. Once you are taking those resources — for instance having a woman you talked to once at an EAG come and fly out and live with you and work for you while nomadically traveling and paying her next to nothing, or do the same via a short hiring process — then as soon as someone else in that group sees credible evidence that “Wait, these people look to me like they have taken advantage of this resource and really hurt some people and intimidated them into covering it up”, then it behooves them to say so loud and clear!
Perhaps you do not believe this is true of EA circles, and as an older person in these circles that generally correlates (quite wisely) with being on the more hesitant side of giving your full life to whatever a person currently in EA leadership randomly thinks you should do. Nonetheless I think two younger people here have been eaten up and chewed out and I think it’ll happen again, because of people resting on this inaccurately high level of trust. So I’ll say it as loud as you like :)
To some extent, I agree with this, but I also think it overlooks an important component of how defamation law is used in practice — which is not to hold people to high epistemic norms but instead to scare them out of harming your reputation regardless of the truth. This is something folks who work on corporate campaigns for farmed animal welfare run into all the time. And, because our legal system is imperfect, it often works. Brian Martin has a good write-up on the flaws in our legal system that contribute to this:
I’m not saying this is what’s happening here — I have no idea about the details of any of these allegations. But what if someone did have additional private information about Nonlinear or the folks involved? Unless they are rich or have a sophisticated understanding of the law, the scary lawyer talk from Nonlinear here might deter them from talking about it at all, and I think that’s a really bad epistemic norm. This isn’t to say “the EA Forum should be completely insulated from defamation law” or anything, but in a high-trust community where people will respond to alternatives like publicly sharing counterevidence, threatening lawsuits seems like it might hinder, rather than help, epistemics.
I want to point out that the existence of a libel law that is expensive to engage with, does practically nothing against the posting of anonymized callout posts. You can’t sue someone you can’t identify.
Love it or hate it: the more harshly libel law is enforced, the more I expect similar things to be handled through fully-anonymous or low-transparency channels, instead of high-transparency ones. And in aggregate, I expect an environment high on libel suits, to disincentivize transparent behavior or highly specific allegations (which risks de-anonymization) on the part of accusers, more strongly than it incentivizes epistemic carefulness.
This is one reason to be against encouraging highly litigious attitudes, that I haven’t yet seen mentioned, so I thought I’d briefly put it out there.
I am not a lawyer but have read about defamation law and asked lawyers questions about it. I don’t believe your description of defamation law is as clear cut as you’re making it out to be.
The standard for fault in defamation cases involving private figures is that the defamer had to be “negligent.” That is, they have to have failed to do something they were required to do. Negligence is a vague standard, and it is up to the jury to decide what that means. Framing the point of defamation law as “encourage very high epistemic standards” is just too strong a statement. A jury could interpret it that way, but a jury could interpret it as a much much lower standard.
Furthermore, in my view, basic elements of this post make it a weak case, regardless of whether the claims within it are true of false. Ben is not stating these claims as undisputed, unqualified facts. He is reporting information others have shared with him. It’s only straightforward defamation if he is just making up what people said to him. It’d be more in the defamation camp if Ben himself was saying “Nonlinear mistreated me.”
It seems absolutely inappropriate to me for Nonlinear to threaten to sue in this case. This is a tactic abusers use, and high-integrity people pursue it in much narrower cases.
No, a kneejerk threat of libel still seems to me really bad, whether it’s legally permissable or not. Seems far worse epistemic damage than the thing it seeks to mitigate.
If people do this regularly I’d give to a legal defense fund for people to be able to post criticisms of org founders without fear.
If we aren’t able to criticise non-profits without fear of libel then how exactly are we supposed to hold each other to account.
This seems particularly clear in the case of non-anonymous posts like Ben’s. Ben posted a thing that risks damaging Nonlinear’s reputation. In the process, he’s put his own reputation at risk: Nonlinear can publicly respond with information that shows Ben was wrong (and perhaps negligent, unfair, etc.), causing us to put a lot less stock in Ben’s word next time around.
Alice and Chloe are anonymous, but by having a named individual vouch for them to some degree, we create a situation where ordinary reputational costs can do a good job of incentivizing honesty on everyone’s part.
Thanks for making me (us?) a bit less confused about legal things!